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Donald Trump yesterday accused China of "unpresidented" action in its capture of a US drone, risking inflaming a diplomatic crisis that both sides had been seeking to play down.

China said it would return the US Navy's unmanned underwater glider, which it seized on Thursday, "in an appropriate manner" after behind the scenes talks with the US, which had lodged a formal complaint over the seizure.

But it warned against the "hyping up" of the incident, which it said was "not beneficial", a few hours after the president-elect sent out a misspelled tweet accusing China of theft of the vessel.

"China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented[sic] act," Mr Trump tweeted in the early hours of yesterday/Sat morning.

The tweet was later reissued with the correct spelling of “unprecedented”. The tweet containing the error was deleted.

Screenshot of Donald Trump's tweet with the spelling error, before it was deleted from his Twitter account

Both countries had been seeking to quietly resolve the delicate incident, with the Chinese foreign ministry on Saturday saying it had been working behind the scenes with the United States "all along". President Barack Obama avoided passing comment at his end-of-year press conference on Friday.

Mr Trump's message was itself an unprecedented action. President-elects usually wait until after they are inaugurated to begin passing comment on sensitive diplomatic matters, if at all.

The seizure of the drone coincided with sabre-rattling from Chinese state media and some in its military establishment after Mr Trump cast doubt on whether Washington would stick to its nearly four decades-old policy of recognising that Taiwan is part of "one China".

His comments came after he enraged China by accepting a congratulatory call from the president of Taiwan.

The one China principle, which has been followed by Washington since it switched relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, has been described by China as the “bedrock” of relations between the world’s two most powerful countries.

On Friday Mr Obama said anyone upending the One China would have to be "conscious of the consequences. They will not treat that like some other issues."

Donald Trump has broken with the custom for president-elects to avoid commenting on diplomatic affairsCredit:
GETTY IMAGES

The drone was taken on Thursday night, the first seizure of its kind in recent memory, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines, just as the USNS Bowditch was about to retrieve the unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), US officials said.

"The UUV was lawfully conducting a military survey in the waters of the South China Sea," a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's a sovereign immune vessel, clearly marked in English not to be removed from the water - that it was US property."

"It is ours, and it is clearly marked as ours and we would like it back. And we would like this not to happen again," Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said. Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun issued a statement on Saturday saying that a Chinese navy lifeboat discovered an unknown device in the South China Sea.

"In order to prevent this device from posing a danger to the safe navigation of passing ships and personnel, the Chinese lifeboat adopted a professional and responsible attitude in investigating and verifying the device," Yang said.

The statement said that after verifying that the device was an American unmanned submerged device, "China decided to transfer it to the US through appropriate means."

The statement also accused the US of long deploying ships "in China's presence" to conduct "military surveying."

China's aircraft carrier Liaoning is seen during live-ammunition drill recently in the waters of the Bohai Sea in northern ChinaCredit:
AP

"China is resolutely opposed to this and requests the US stop such activities," it said. "China will continue to maintain vigilance against the relevant U.S. activities and will take necessary measures to deal with them."

The seizure will add to concerns about China's increased military presence and aggressive posture in the disputed South China Sea, including its militarization of maritime outposts.

A US research group said this week that new satellite imagery indicated China has installed weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems, on all seven artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea.